Plymouth is a freedesktop.org project to create a flicker free graphical bootup system designed and developed by Red Hat and included in Fedora 10. Red Hat has been working on Xorg drivers and within the Linux kernel to improve and enhance the kernel mode support needed for Plymouth. Fedora 10 included support for many ATI cards and this is being developed further in Fedora 11 to cover Intel and Nvidia cards as well. Plymouth supports a flexible and powerful plug-in system which can be used to create Plymouth themes. Fedora includes several of them including a simple progress bar and the solar plugin. Now additional work is being done to improve many things and this will land up in Fedora 11 as well.

Fedora is just great. I've not used it in ages (though it generally worked pretty well for me back when I did) but they're doing so much good work that's going to benefit me eventually whichever distro I choose to use.

They do a lot more than push out a bleeding edge distro with a pretty UI every 6 months - they (Fedora and Redhat) really put a lot of work into developing solutions for many of the niggling Linux problems that exist on many levels of the stack.

It always seems to me that - generally - Red Hat really know which side their bread is buttered. They know they owe their business to a healthy OSS ecosystem and they have the courage to stand behind that and develop stuff in the open, even though that eventually benefits their competitors too. Regardless of whether one likes to use their products, I think that their resisting the natural urge to hoard their intellectual property to try to get an "edge" deserves a huge helping of respect.

They're not perfect - AFAIK we still don't know the details of the Fedora server compromises last year. But on the development side I do really appreciate their way of doing things.